Archive for the ‘Allgemein’ Category

For a long time, skills in CRPGs followed their pen&paper counterparts, serving the function of defining a character in more detail than the broad statistics like Strength and Intelligence would do. The game that changed this, to the best of my knowledge, was Diablo II; it is possible that Blizzard only adapted systems already present [ Read More ]

It has been a long time in the making, but I finally completed “On Economy”, the third in my examinations of CRPG design fundamentals. It is a rather complex topic and required a healthy amount of research, but I think the result is my best work yet. Take a look and tell me what you [ Read More ]

Finally! I updated the Dark Disciples II downloads – they are now embedded in the DxWnd shell, so they will run on Windows 10 as well. The downloads are preconfigured, so you should be able to simply download, extract and start with the DD2.exe. As changing of the directory names can screw up DxWnd, I [ Read More ]

This posting is about a special kind of puzzles, namely conversation puzzles. For all the environment interaction puzzles you’d normally find in a dungeon, look here: Puzzles (I) Morrowind was one of the last major RPGs with a keyword-based dialogue system (A) Background (Skip to (B) if you don’t care.) Conversations with NPCs serve many [ Read More ]

Designing puzzles is one of the hardest parts of RPG creation. We want them to be creative and unique, but not beyond all common sense; interesting and challenging, but not frustrating. And for the icing on the cake, they should fit into the game world as well as possible (nothing like having to navigate a [ Read More ]

(Inspired by this thread.) Before thinking about ways to block off an area, we must first decide whether we want to implement such blockades at all. I’m not talking about locked doors here, but large-scale blockades which impede the journey into the next part of the game world until a certain requirement is reached. The opposite approach [ Read More ]

Yes, this is a post about grinding. No, don’t just run away! I’m aware that this is not exactly the most popular game mechanic ever invented, but there’s more to it than meets the eye, and certainly more than the “Bring me 100 frog ears” treadmill that defines so much of the MMORPG genre. Note: [ Read More ]

Hmmm. The immortal Sid Meier once declared that “a good game consists of a series of interesting decisions”. (I’m not certain he’s entirely right with this, as it excludes all games revolving around dexterity or reaction speed, but then this site is not about Super Mario anyway.) If we try to apply this adage to [ Read More ]

Over the winter holidays, I finished “The Quest”, brought to my attention by the Legend of Erthia creator. While it only recently appeared on Steam, it actually has a long history as a mobile game, having been available in the iPhone app store since 2009. There are several very favorable reviews for the app out there; I [ Read More ]

I must admit I never really thought about money in RPGs until I found the CRPG Addict and CRPGs Revisited sites and their rating category “Economy”. To summarize the Addict, a game would get a high “Economy” rating if there were lots of ways to make money and lots of ways to spend it. The [ Read More ]